Human cost of China’s hukou system

November 8, 2013 9:03 am

Human cost of China’s hukou system

By Lucy Hornby in Beijing

Bored and unsupervised by his barely literate grandparents, 16-year-old Yang Hui started hanging out with other dropouts in the streets of dusty Zhangjiachuan in Northwest China. His posts on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, were increasingly laced with profanity and street talk. Police questioned him as a witness to a motorbike theft. His grades fell.And then in September, Yang became the first person detained under China’s new ‘rumour-mongering’ regulations, for a posting in support of a demonstration that turned into a confrontation with police. After a national uproar, the scared but defiant teenager walked out of his jail cell a week later.

He narrowly escaped three years in jail, but still lives at the mercy of China’s household registration system, which forced his parents to send him 1,000 miles away to attend high school.

Yang’s parents are part of the mass migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese out of the nation’s poor interior to the more prosperous cities. Like many others, they raised their son in a city setting entirely different from their own rural upbringing.

Across China, city children as young as 12 or 13 are banished to rural towns when they reach secondary school thanks to the household registration or hukou system, which restricts access to public services such as schools or hospitals outside a person’s official residence. The hukou restrictions are the biggest barrier to integrating into China’s cities more than 260m migrant workers. Lack of hukou restricts migrants from buying homes, seeing doctors and sending their children to school, meaning that a generation of young Chinese migrants like Yang risk coming of age without a full education.

Reform of the hukou system is one of the policies the Communist party is expected to debate at its Third Plenum meeting, which begins on Saturday – an occasion for the party’s new leadership under President Xi Jinping to set priorities for their next decade in power.

Dismantling the hukou system would remove the biggest obstacle to China’s official goal of accelerating urbanisation, but it is opposed by city governments that do not want to pay the bill for a sharp increase in demand for services such as hospitals and schools.

“Resistance to these reforms” comes mainly from the difficulty of reallocating power and resources between the central and local governments, Jiong Shao, analyst at Macquarie, wrote this week.

“Urbanisation also offers huge potential for long-term domestic demand,” Premier Li Keqiang, an advocate of top-down urbanisation, wrote in an Financial Times op-ed this year He estimated 100m Chinese still in the countryside need to be absorbed into cities.

Providing basic public services to migrant workers and their families, to enable them to become city residents would cost 80,000 yuan ($13,000) per person according to estimates by a State Council think-tank. Other estimates run as high as 200,000 yuan a person.

Hu Xingdou, economist and a crusader for hukou reform, says those cost calculations don’t count the contributions of low-wage, industrious and entrepreneurial migrants who are already in the cities. And undercounting migrants also skews statistics to the benefit of local bureaucrats, Mr Hu says: “In calculating GDP, the contributions of migrant labourers are counted, but on a per-capita basis, the migrant population [which is not officially living in the cities] does not appear. Therefore, when considering their performance metrics city mayors aren’t inclined towards hukou reform.”

Hukou in numbers

260m – the number of China’s migrant workers

*52.57% – the percentage of the Chinese population now living in cities

*35.29% – the percentage of the population with urban hukou

80,000Rmb ($13,000) – the per person cost of integrating migrants into cities

* according to 2012 census

By Zhao Tianqi in Beijing

China has already relaxed hukou restrictions significantly since migrants began flooding into cities and coastal factories in the 1980s and 1990s. Some provinces no longer make a distinction between rural migrants and urbanites in their region, in others migrants can freely register in certain areas but can’t easily become residents of the larger and more attractive cities. Migrants can now enrol in medical insurance programmes, although often reimbursements don’t cross provincial lines.

It has gradually become easier for migrant parents to enrol young children in city schools, although they pay more than city students. That means many parents no longer have to leave babies behind in the countryside when they migrate for work and many choose to raise their children in the cities – that is, as long as they can.

Yang is a typical case. Raised by his migrant parents, who run a noodle restaurant in Beijing, he attended good primary schools in the city. But students without a Beijing hukou cannot take the college exams in Beijing and since the tests differ by province, they have to go to local schools to get the proper study materials. So young secondary school students who grew up in big cities are often sent to live with elderly grandparents or at boarding schools in small provincial towns. Anxious parents often watch from afar as grades fall and lonely teenagers become sullen and uncommunicative.

“His attitude to his studies, his ideals, all changed. Before he left he wanted to study to get into college. But there he was mostly hanging out with dropouts and he started to think there was no point to studying,” Yang’s father Yang Niuhu told the FT in Beijing.

Yang Hui is still in Zhangjiachuan, under the watchful eye of the powerful local police. Bringing him back to Beijing would ruin his chances for a university education, but schooling him in a bigger city in Gansu province would involve his mother leaving the restaurant business and his younger brother in Beijing. “I’m really at a loss over this problem,” his father says. Without further hukou reform other families could be left in the same position.